A voice startled Herc awake. He’d fallen asleep in the easy chair in the living room watching an old Clint Eastwood movie that he’d recorded on DVR. He looked around to find himself alone—his wife, Ellen, must have gone to bed—and it took him a few seconds to backtrack in his mind and figure out what had woken him.

The voice came again. “Hey, asshole! Answer the phone!”

His throat went dry and he stared over at a little corner shelf. Next to a tiny copper statue of an Indian—a replica of a famous Fredric Remington sculpture—a bright red cell phone lay charging. The Hot Line. Herc kept it charged, kept it with him, though it almost never rang. Today he had nearly forgotten about it.

“Hey, asshole! Answer the phone!” it screamed again.

Sean McCandless had recorded that message for Herc’s ringtone. Now his voice was shouting from the grave. Herc spent a half a second longer trying to figure out who the hell could be calling him—only a handful of people had the number, including Sean and Terry—then he scrambled from the chair and raced for it.

“Hello? Terry?”

The line had a hollow tone. Dead, empty air. Whoever it was had hung up. He clicked over to check the number of his last incoming call and for a second the breath froze in his lungs. McCandless, C. In the space between blinks, he had let himself believe that somehow it had all been a huge mistake or some kind of cover-up, that Sean had been in deep cover and the corpse had not belonged to him, that he was calling now to apologize for putting Herc through the shock and grief.

But, of course, C stood for Caitlin. Sean had told Herc a thousand times that he had given Caitlin the Hot Line number, just in case he went off the radar for a while and an emergency came up. Now Herc thought of Boyce and his insistence that he be the one to deal with Cait if she tried calling back. Boyce was an idiot. Why would she call that number when they had already told her Sean had died?

“Shit,” he whispered, staring at the phone in his hand. It felt strangely warm.

If he called Cait back and Boyce found out, things could get very ugly. He would be disobeying a direct order. But his hesitation only lasted a second. Sean would have put his life on the line for Herc any day of the week. The least Herc could do in return was put his job on the line for Caitlin. He had made promises to Sean, sworn to look out for her if she ever needed help and Sean wasn’t available. Boyce would never understand such promises, but Boyce was a prick.

Herc hit the callback button and put the phone to his ear, ready to talk. Ready to help. But the call went straight through to Cait’s voice mail as if she had the phone off and he hung up without leaving a message. No reason to give Boyce any evidence; that would just be asking for trouble.

Half a minute ticked by while he stood there in the living room, his wife sleeping upstairs and Clint Eastwood dying on the television, poisoned by a crazy Civil War–era schoolgirl who thought she loved him. He tried the number again with the same result, then started to worry. Cait knew the Hot Line was for emergencies. Maybe whatever she was calling for counted, or maybe she just wasn’t satisfied with the answers she had been getting and wanted a more private conversation with him, but it didn’t matter. After his conversation with Stanovitch, he had already made up his mind to talk to her, but he had planned to do it a bit more surreptitiously, telling himself she would be in D.C. for some kind of memorial for Sean soon enough.

Apparently he’d been fooling himself with his definition of soon enough.

He ran it all through his mind again. According to Stanovitch, the cars watching her aunt and uncle’s house had blank plates, which required a level of political clout that seemed almost mythical to Herc. He’d never known anyone who moved in those circles. But with Sean dead, it was obvious something major was going on, no matter what Boyce said.

Again he tried calling Cait. Again the call went straight to voice mail. Inside, he knew something awful had happened. The weight of that certainty seemed almost enough to suffocate him.

You should’ve moved on it immediately. Idiot. The self-recriminations came hard and fast. He had been frozen by Stanovitch’s revelation, had told himself that whatever had happened had been focused on Sean. He’d been concerned for Cait, but not enough to act immediately.

Sean McCandless had been his best friend. In all the time they’d known each other, he’d only ever really asked Herc for one thing, and Herc had blown it.

The red phone felt weightless in his hand. He swore under his breath as he strode toward the small room at the back of the house that he kept as an office. Green banker’s lamp over the rolltop desk. Original poster for The Eiger Sanction signed by Eastwood and George Kennedy over a bookcase. Next to the computer monitor, a black address book. He grabbed it, flipped through to M, found the number Sean had given him more than two years ago for his sister.

He dialed.

Someone picked up on the second ring. “Hello?”

Herc exhaled, thinking Thank Christ. “Cait? Caitlin?”

“Who’s this?”

Shit. Not Caitlin. And as innocuously as the woman had tried to deliver the query, the tone had the air of authority, of someone used to getting an answer when she asked a question. Cop.

“I’m returning a call,” Herc said. “Is Cait there?”

“Not at the moment. Maybe you’d like to leave a—”

Herc killed the call. He stared at the red phone like it would be able to help him somehow, trying to figure out what the hell to do next. The woman who had answered Cait’s phone was either a cop or a Fed. Cait had called and hung up and now he couldn’t reach her. The only thing he could think to do was wait until she tried to get in touch again.

He hung his head. “Fuck me.”

He’d done enough sitting and waiting. It might already have cost Sean’s little sister her life. And Cait had a baby, too. He’d practically forgotten about that. Sean’s niece.

Jaw tight, knowing he might be throwing away his job, not to mention putting himself in danger, he scanned his contacts list until he found the one he needed, and then he made the call.

It rang a long time. Just when he had begun to think he would have to leave a voice mail, the ringing ceased.

“It’s late.”

“Yeah,” Herc agreed. “Let’s just hope it’s not too late. We need to meet.”

“This line is safe,” Terry Stanovitch said.

Herc frowned. Stupid thing for a CIA man to say.

“No line is safe.”